Session Details

Generating Fractals in the Browser With Rust and WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a low-level instruction format designed to be a compilation target for systems programming languages such as C, C++, and Rust. Code compiled to WebAssembly executes at near-native speeds, allowing developers to write performance-critical parts of their JavaScript application in a lower-level language for a significant performance boost.
Rust is a safe, concurrent, and fast programming language developed by Mozilla. Designed as a practical replacement for C and C++, it's used in production as a part of Firefox's rendering pipeline. Other users of Rust include Figma, Deliveroo, and Microsoft.
This talk is about building an application that renders a Mandlebrot fractal in the Web browser. The user interface for the application is built with regular ol' HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and Rust is used for generating the fractal.
Here is an outline of the talk:
- What is the Mandlebrot set?
- What is WebAssembly? What is it good for?
- What is the browser support for WebAssembly look like?
- What is Rust? Why use Rust for anything?
- How does Rust compile to WebAssembly?
- How does code compiled to WebAssembly interact with JavaScript?
- Hands-on demonstration, generating a fractal using Rust code
- Can an entire Web application be built with Rust?
Attendees don't have to be familiar with either Rust or WebAssembly to attend this talk.